Pun’s recent book Migrant Labor in China is an exciting new addition to the growing field of Chinese labour studies. It brings Pun’s more than two-decade-long study of Chinese migrant labour to general readers. Synthesizing data from in-depth interviews, questionnaires, and surveys of migrant workers across a broad range of industries and geographical locations – research conducted after the earlier ethnographic study of female textile workers, Pun presents an empathetic account of the struggles of two generations of migrant workers for dignity and meaning in daily life and work. These workers, Pun argues, “form the new political subjects for potential resistance, shape the future of the labour movement in China, and provide a quest for world labour internationalism” (p. 4).
The book’s opening lines flag its unapologetically Marxist theoretical framework, declaring that “class is still the central concept of this book” (p. 1). Using a class analysis that borrows as much from Karl Marx as from Beverly Silver, Pun situates in the first chapter the formation of China’s new working class in the global context of neoliberal capitalism. In spite of the Chinese Communist Party’s self-professed commitment to Marxism, China’s ruling party has become the most steadfast disciple of neoliberal capitalist ideology, and insisted on emancipating the market from state control. Beginning in 1979, market liberalization reforms launched China on a path of export-oriented economic growth. Concurrent with developing export-oriented industries, the Chinese party-state also began a three-decade-long project of privatizing state enterprises and dismantling cradle-to-grave social provisions. Yet, China’s experience with market liberalization undercuts the salience of the neoliberal argument against state interference in market activities. In this chapter and the rest of the book, Pun demonstrates how the Chinese party-state parlayed China’s abundant supply of cheap labour into a comparative advantage in the global capitalist economy.
The second chapter elucidates how the Chinese party-state’s reconfigured role in economic affairs affected labour relations. This reconfiguration, which began in the late 1970s and persists today, rests on the party-state retreating from agricultural production while intervening in coastal industries as labour intermediaries. The party-state’s retreat contributes to declining returns, which in turn created incentives for out-migration. At the same time, it acts directly to draw rural surplus labour to coastal regions where labour-intensive export-oriented manufacturing enterprises are located. The Chinese party-state screens, recruits, and even transports young people to factories in the coastal regions (pp. 30–31). Furthermore, the party-state tolerates provincial and county-level governments relaxing the hukou (household registration) system in rural areas in order to facilitate out-migration and municipal governments excluding rural migrant workers from the urban hukou system. Manipulating the hukou system ensures low wages in two ways. First, migrant workers with their rural hukou permits earn 57.4 per cent less than what their counterparts with urban hukou permits earn (p. 35). Second, migrant workers excluded from urban social programmes have to return home for marriage, childcare, their children’s education, and retirement. These persistent ties, in effect, transfer the costs of labour reproduction and the social costs of urban industrial development to rural communities. Transnational corporations, as well as various levels of the Chinese government, benefit from migrant labour’s exploitation. The chart on page thirty-seven of the volume under review reveals the staggering profits that transnational corporations reap. Of the retail price of a single iPhone in 2010, 1.8 per cent went to the migrant labour while 58.5 per cent to the technology company Apple. That migrant workers are prevented from becoming urban citizens through the manipulation of the hukou system results in, what Pun describes as, “a process of unfinished proletarianization of Chinese labor” (p. 33).
Contributing to the “process of unfinished proletarianization” among construction workers – the focus of Chapter three – is a labour subcontracting system. In an industry known for poor workplace safety and unreliable wage payments, developers rely on predatory labour subcontractors to recruit migrant workers using native place, kinship, and ethnic ties. Rural social relations are deployed for labour recruitment, but the original impetus was the party-state’s policy to deregulate the construction labour market. According to two state documents from the 1980s that Pun unearthed, the party-state declared the need to replace permanent construction workers with the ad hoc recruitment of temporary workers so as to facilitate the fast-growing building industry.
Chapter four explores the emotional trauma of the unfinished proletarianization process. As Pun observes, this process suspends its subjects in a transitory zone between rural and urban worlds, leaving them in “a deepening sense of becoming incomplete, that is, of becoming a peasant-worker” (p. 68). This sense of incompleteness, aptly captured in a migrant worker’s poem as “a state of wandering” and a “route to becoming nobody”, holds true even for second-generation migrant workers, who, unlike their predecessors, had spent a greater portion of their lives in the urban world. The life story of Xin, a second-generation migrant worker whom Pun followed for a year, illustrates this sense of incompleteness and wandering. Xin left in 1998 for employment in a factory in Shenzhen. For two years, Xin worked at various factories in Shenzhen before deciding to return to his village in Hebei province in hopes of starting a business with his savings and in reaction to feelings of isolation in Shenzhen. His business venture failed within a few months. Returning to Shenzhen, Xin easily found work but not a sense of completeness, confiding “I miss my home while I was out to dagong [work for a living]. When I returned home, I thought of going out again” (p. 79).
An important node in migrant workers’ transitory circuits between the countryside and the city is the factory’s dormitory. Chapter five discusses the dormitory’s role in sustaining the incomplete process of proletarianization. Factory management often strives to build dormitories in close proximity to the factory and to secure the dormitories with the highest degree of surveillance. An internal factory document reveals a management’s justification for this spatial arrangement: “to meet the international requirements” and “to confine our workers in better living conditions so that they can be more accessible to work” (p. 93). Making workers “accessible to work” became more urgent with the shift to just-in-time manufacturing, which called for production to meet immediate demand and not in anticipation of future demand. However, dormitories are not spaces for settling families. As a worker keenly notes: “What’s the use of a good-looking dormitory? It still keeps my family separate” (p. 96).
Chapter six bring together the themes of global production networks, state intervention, and labour processes in its account of Chinese workers’ experience at Foxconn. With a workforce of 1.4 million and annual revenue of USD 95.2 billion, Foxconn is “currently the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics”, producing for major brands such as Apple, Dell, and Samsung Electronics (p. 110). Foxconn’s rise to dominance in the electronics industry intertwines with China’s post-socialist transformations. Foxconn’s relationship with the Sichuan provincial government illustrates this intertwining. Not only did the Sichuan government facilitate the construction of Foxconn’s production complex and dormitories with tax rebates, it even mobilized government officials to assist in recruiting labour for Foxconn and allowed vocational schools to send “student interns” to work for the company. Work in Foxconn factories is demanding, intense, and highly regimented. Long hours, physically and emotionally exhausting work, lack of control over production processes, and isolating living conditions in the dormitories pushed many young workers to the brink.
The final chapter’s discussion on construction and Foxconn workers’ acts of resistance seeks to end the book on an uplifting note. For construction workers, their only way of getting back their delayed wages was nao, or “creating a disturbance” (p. 143). Disturbances that disrupt builders’ operations, such as destroying buildings, yield results, while taking legal action or petitioning the government achieved little. Moral outrage, not class consciousness, compels these workers’ actions. In contrast, Pun finds that the actions and language of Foxconn workers most closely resemble conventional expressions of working-class resistance, citing examples of Foxconn workers’ riots, strikes, and even poetry that articulated their awareness of common interests. In the Foxconn workers, Pun detects the makings of China’s new working-class radicalism.
This chapter makes a weak capstone to the book’s bold argument. First, the evidence of construction workers’ experiences and resistance does not consistently square with this assertion. For instance, as noted on page 148, disgruntled construction workers often used “the language of justice and law” instead of “class”. However, the contention that “the accusation of the principle of injustice lies squarely at the core of the capital-labor relation” is an insight of the author, not her informants (pp. 148–149). Second, the elevation of the dormitory “as a battlefield for fighting against capital” and “as a space of contestation for articulating a new class consciousness” lacks persuasiveness (pp. 168–169). Two chapters earlier, we were told that the dormitory is a transitory space for transient labour. It is indisputable that the dormitory facilitates exchange of information and experiences of collective resistance, but it is questionable how a transitory space can foster longer-term solidarities. These issues notwithstanding, this book should be compulsory reading for all those interested in the contemporary Chinese economy, the politics of development, and labour studies.
